Ninja Gaiden Demo Busted

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Short but very, very sweet.

By Anoop Gantayat

Just a couple of weeks prior to the full game's release, a demo of Ninja Gaiden has made its way into a bundle with Japanese Xbox publication Famitsu Xbox (a publication that sells enough copies to make it the number three top selling Xbox-related item in Japan). IGN Xbox picked up the issue and the demo and have spent the past few hours becoming one with Ryu Hayabusa.

The demo consists of Ninja Gaiden's first level, "The Way of the Ninja." Ryu starts off in a mountainside, in approach of a structure called the "Ninja Fortress." The opening area outside the fortress serves as a tutorial of sorts, instructing players in some of Ryu's basic movies, such as wall climbing, wall running and back flips. It also provides some simple fights prior to the more frantic affairs in the fortress.

The Ninja Fortress contains multiple rooms, each packed with enemies. Some of the rooms close off upon entry, requiring that you kill the enemies who appear in full before you're able to go about your way. Other areas have just a couple of enemies in waiting, requiring you to keep your guard when turning corners.

We encountered a single simple puzzle in this stage. In order to get into the inner compound, Ryu has to find a key. The key is being grasped by a statue that seems to be missing something from its face. Searching around the stage for a special item in an item box provides the simple solution. We didn't actually have to search -- rather, we found the item just as we made our way through the stage and had to merely backtrack to the statue to get the key.

As he makes his way through the first level, Ryu encounters four types of enemies. Standard ninja foes take just a few hits to do away with, while white-colored foes are stronger and smarter, requiring multiple combination attacks. The underground region of the stage is home to a couple of bats that we did away with easily thanks to Hayabusa's automatic lock-on shuriken skills. Finally, there's the last boss, which required us to take a more strategic approach, or we'd wind up eating tatami.

For the most part, once you've killed a set of enemies it seems to be gone for good. In the demo version, this is true for all but the underground bats and for a constantly reappearing flood of enemies in one of the mid-way rooms.